My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  Discouraged, I said nothing. I found a Bible in a drawer beside the bed, and when I looked round Mrs Morton had pulled a chair over beside the wireless on the dressing table. She switched it on and turned the knob past a man talking and a woman singing till she stopped at the kind of music that needs violins and a conductor wagging a stick. She asked, ‘Do you mind?’ and I shrugged. It wasn’t up to me what she did, and anyway she’d put the music on so softly you could hardly hear it.

  I took the Bible over with me and sat in a chair opposite her. Not the book I’d have chosen, but there was nothing else. I turned the pages and glanced at little bits here and there until I came to The Second Book of the Kings and got interested in this man called Elisha. He did a lot of stuff like watching his master Elijah going up to heaven in a chariot of fire and advising the king of Israel how to beat the Moabites, but what got me was that when a crowd of little children laughed at him and shouted, ‘Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head’, he cursed them in the name of the Lord and a pair of she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the children apart. I thought it wasn’t easy to know what to make of a man like that.

  When I looked up Mrs Morton was lying back with her eyes closed. Whatever had been on the wireless, the music was over and a bunch of fruity-voiced pleased-with-themselves was discussing something or other. I bent over her to switch off, and she opened her eyes, making me step back in a kind of fright, and asked, ‘Did you think I was sleeping?’

  I went back and sat down.

  After a while, I asked, ‘Have you thought about what we should do?’

  She shook her head as if at a novel idea. ‘I was more resting than thinking.’

  ‘We needed time to think, you said.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We’d found the time, and as a bonus the place too. We sat and looked at each other and then for a while we looked away. It wasn’t that I wasn’t thinking, more that none of it was worth putting into words, each thought like an old donkey going in circles round a pole. The donkeys plodded and every so often for no good reason ran in a panic as if under the lash. Not thinking, then; more like a three-year-old bawling, ‘I want my Mammy!’

  When Mrs Morton got up and lifted the phone beside the bed, I thought she’d decided to phone home. In my confusion, I didn’t follow what she was saying. It was only when she looked over her shoulder and asked, ‘Do you like steak?’ that I understood she was ordering a meal.

  A big room – there was plenty of space to bring in the trolley table. They called it room service, and it was terrific, like a picnic. I almost said so, but stopped myself in time. I didn’t want her to think me a clown altogether. We had three courses and coffee. I don’t think I’d ever eaten so much in one day in my entire life. We had wine, too, but it was the food I was drunk on and sitting in a room like this to eat it. She must have done all of that before, but the way she listened to me, nodding and even laughing, it almost seemed as if she might be drunk too.

  At one point during the meal, I needed to pee but didn’t want to break the spell – put it like that. Anyway, I didn’t know where the lavatory was, and I sat there until I thought my bladder would burst and that was part of the strangeness, as if in addition to all the other things I was getting drunk on I was getting drunk on my body’s poisons, too. Then Mrs Morton got up and without a word disappeared into the little entrance corridor. I followed her and stood staring at a closed door until I realised I’d found the bathroom. She came back, sat down, picked up her glass and smiled at me. I wondered how she’d feel if she knew I’d heard the sound she made pissing.

  ‘We could have brandy with the coffee,’ she said. ‘Would you like that?’ And when I hesitated at an offer so exotic, she pulled a long pad from her bag and waved it at me. The chequebook. One she’d been given to pay household expenses. ‘Not that I’ve done that for a long time. But they’re still good.’

  Let her husband pay, then. He owed Alec that much. You couldn’t go around putting people into hospital without paying for it. And Alec wouldn’t mind us collecting on his behalf. Well, he’d mind like hell, actually, but for the moment that seemed only to add to the joke.

  ‘Brandy would be great.’

  When it came to it, I was too long for the single bed. She shook her head when she saw me curled in a cramped ball and made up a bed on the floor with blankets and pillows she found on the top shelf of the wardrobe. While I was trying to get comfortable wriggling into this nest on the carpet, she crouched down by the cases. She opened the big one, then pulled the smaller one nearer.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ she wondered.

  ‘It was in the boot.’

  She tugged at the clasps. ‘It’s locked.’

  ‘I lifted it out with the other one.’

  ‘It’s not mine. I didn’t bring it.’

  ‘Sorry. I thought they belonged together.’ It didn’t seem worth fussing over.

  She took a nightdress from the big case and went into the bathroom with it. When she came out, I pretended I was asleep, stealing one flickering image of her climbing into bed.

  I lay awake after she put out the light. Something was nagging at me, something about the little case, something I should remember. It was like a forgotten word, almost on the tip of my tongue. Almost I had it.

  Her voice startled me, whispering out of the dark. ‘We’ll have to decide. We can’t stay in Glasgow, not after what happened to your stepfather.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop calling him that,’ I said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘Why she-bears?’ she asked.

  It had been like talking to myself, looking out of the window as the fields went by with never a word to show she’d heard me. I’d started to tell her about Elisha to give myself the illusion of company because I was tired of the silence. After a while I wondered if I was annoying her, decided I must be, but stubbornly kept on.

  That morning we’d found the hotel parking area had filled up overnight and at first we hadn’t been able to find the car. That’s when the panic hit her. She’d walked up and down the rows, faster and faster. Following her, shivering in the morning wind, holding bags with the names of the expensive stores on the outside, I’d tried to make sense of her fright. She’d paid the bill for the room with a cheque. Was that it? When she’d torn a cheque from the book and handed it to the receptionist, the gesture had a touch of magic for me.

  Afterwards, coming out of the hotel, I’d said to her, ‘You could pay for anything with one of those, couldn’t you?’ ‘What were you thinking of?’ ‘Like, food.’ ‘It got us dinner and breakfast.’ ‘Go round a grocer’s with one of those. Anything you wanted, you’d just stick it in the basket. You wouldn’t have to look at the prices.’ And not just groceries. ‘Shoes and clothes,’ I’d said. ‘Anything you wanted.’ And then she’d said, ‘Till the bills came in,’ and become grimly silent.

  Was it the idea of her husband having to pay the hotel that had suddenly frightened her? Then I realised that was shit. When we found the car and she dived inside as if I wasn’t there, I understood, as if she’d spelled it out to me, what the panic was about. The two of us walking across the hotel lobby with people glancing as they went by, that couldn’t have been easy for her. And then when we came out I’d spouted all that stuff about cheques. Listening to an excited, ignorant boy, no wonder she’d panicked when she couldn’t find the car. Without the car, us being together made no sense. We needed the car to hide from reality.

  And so for miles, looking out of the window at the fields, I’d told her what I remembered about the prophet Elisha.

  It had taken me by surprise when she spoke.

  ‘Why she-bears? Why not just bears? Why couldn’t it just be bears that tear the children apart?’

  I thought about it. ‘Like in the song,’ I said. ‘Because the Bible tells me so?’

  ‘Mothers would be less likely to attack like that,’ she said. ‘It’s father bears that eat their child
ren.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Are you sure you’re not thinking of lions?’

  ‘You don’t really know. Don’t pretend you do.’

  ‘Lions,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Definitely. They’d eat the cubs if the mothers let them.’

  She gave a contemptuous snort. Time passed and just as I thought she’d retreated again into silence, she broke out, ‘Eve gets the blame for all of it. I always disliked that about the Bible, even when I was a girl.’

  We were on our way north. I’d been disoriented and I’d been afraid and it seemed likely I would be again, but I liked the quiet throbbing sound the engine made, and I recognised the smells of soap and leather and perfume. Being in that car was like coming home, and I don’t care how crazy that sounds.

  I suppose you could say my life had changed since the day I drove away from the factory. I remembered the snooty receptionist and Mr Bernard and the fat man I’d thought was the bookkeeper until I met him again, and he turned out to be Mr Norman, one of the family. If we ever met again, maybe he’d recognise me. And I’d learned Mrs Morton’s first name from him. Eileen. And Alice; I’d learned the name of a dead child; Mrs Morton’s dead child. She’d been family, too.

  ‘They don’t look alike at all.’ As soon as I’d spoken, I thought, She won’t know what I’m on about, out of the blue like that, why should she? But she did.

  ‘Brothers often don’t.’

  ‘I suppose . . . Seeing him in the factory, I thought he was just the bookkeeper – something like that.’

  ‘As far as I know, he handles the accounts. That makes him a kind of bookkeeper, I suppose.’

  ‘He kept saying no one paid any attention to him. And he was Mr Bernard’s brother!’

  ‘Mr Bernard?’

  I glanced at her in case she was making fun of me. She wasn’t smiling.

  ‘It’s what everyone in the factory calls him.’ Even his receptionist or secretary or whatever she was, I could have said; but I had a sudden picture of how she’d swung the tight package of her backside when leaving Bernard, and remembering that, I didn’t.

  ‘Did you see them together?’

  Not Bernard and his secretary. The two brothers. I shook my head, and waited for her to explain.

  She was driving fast, which surprised me, holding the wheel loosely and feeding it through her hands without any wasted movements.

  After a while, she said, ‘Don’t make any mistake about those two. They’re very close. You could say they’re joined at the hip.’

  There are people you feel you have to be talking to all the time in an attempt to fill up the silences. Somehow, now, it wasn’t like that with her. We went along, both of us thinking our own thoughts, until I asked, ‘Where are we going?’

  Time for the simple questions.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  That bothered me so much I realised I’d taken it for granted that she would have some idea of a place we might go. I felt one of us should have a plan.

  ‘We can always stay in a hotel,’ I said, ‘like we did last night.’

  ‘I can’t use that chequebook again. Not unless we want Bernard to trace us,’ she said.

  ‘But that could take weeks,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that right?’ I meant that long before then surely all this would be over.

  ‘It only occurred to me this morning,’ she said, which didn’t seem much of an answer.

  I thought about that, until she said, ‘Will he be all right? Your stepfather?’

  ‘He’ll live.’

  ‘What happened to him was terrible. It might be dangerous, if you went back there.’

  ‘I’m not going back.’

  ‘I feel as if it’s my fault.’

  Funnily enough, I felt the same way, despite knowing it wasn’t fair. What had she done wrong, apart from being in a car that I jumped into and drove away because I was being treated like shit? It was me that had been unreasonable. If you were young and poor, what did you expect but to be treated like shit? Like people said, ‘You have to live in the real world,’ as if there was another one waiting around for us to pick as an alternative. So what had she done wrong?

  Be married to a bastard who just might be a crazy bastard? Well, yes. On that count, you could say she had to have some blame. I mean, she must have been there when the wedding was going on. She could have said, ‘No, I’ve changed my mind, I’ve just realised Prince Charming here is a madman.’

  ‘Are you sulking?’ she asked after a while.

  Not able to think of an answer, I scowled at her.

  ‘I’ve been puzzling over why Norman was so interested in this car. What did it matter to him where it was? When I said it was in Howie’s, he couldn’t wait to get out of the door.’

  But I was still working on my grudge. ‘What age were you when you married him? Mr Bernard?’

  There was a silence that went on until I was waiting for her to tell me to mind my own business.

  ‘Older than you are now.’

  ‘That leaves plenty of room,’ I said.

  She made a strange little noise between a gasp and a sigh. ‘Now I think of it, tomorrow’s our anniversary.’

  ‘Hope he wasn’t planning a party.’ If he had been, the surprise would be on him.

  Because she didn’t answer, I had time to think what a funny guy I was. Another Max Bygraves, an English comic who’d been unexpectedly funny after he came back from the States. Tony and I had watched him on television. ‘Give me a close-up,’ he’d said. ‘Closer, closer.’ When it went to an X-ray of his skull, he said, ‘That’s what I call a close-up.’

  ‘He used to,’ she said.

  It took me a moment to work out she was talking about anniversary parties. For something to say, I asked, ‘Where does the road go?’

  ‘Aberdeen, if we keep on.’

  I hadn’t ever been in Aberdeen, but I had an address for someone there. I’d memorised it from a postcard.

  ‘My mother lives in Aberdeen,’ I told her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I woke out of a dream in which I watched a woman’s backside swaying like a pendulum. I was in Mr Bernard’s seat behind the desk, which meant I had a good view. Almost at the door, the secretary looked over her shoulder and asked, ‘You’ve a question for me?’

  Opening my eyes, I wriggled upright in the car seat.

  ‘You fell asleep on the way,’ Mrs Morton said.

  ‘We’re in Aberdeen?’

  After detours and walks, talks and brooding about all that had happened, it had taken us most of the day to decide that was where we would go. A decision not to be looked at too closely, made more out of dismay than hope.

  I couldn’t work out the light. Though grey drops of our breath covered the windows like a curtain, still it was too bright.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Just after seven. In the morning.’

  ‘We slept all night in the car on the street?’

  I wiped the windscreen with the edge of my hand. A line of railing appeared in the arc of cleared glass, and beyond it grass and trees.

  ‘Quiet enough here,’ she said.

  ‘Nowhere’s that quiet.’ I was a city boy. ‘We’re lucky we weren’t robbed or killed.’

  She got out and stood beside the open door, stretching and easing her head one way and the other. I shivered in a surge of cold morning air. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘My neck’s stiff.’

  I got out reluctantly.

  She was looking around in a kind of amazement. ‘Aberdeen,’ she said. Turning from me, she stared across to where opposite the park big semi-detached houses, looming solid and grey, were beginning to show the day’s first lights. ‘What in God’s name am I doing in Aberdeen?’

  She shook her head and walked away. I followed until she came to a stop by the gates into the park. Mist was being tugged like scarves off the tops of the trees. ‘And your mother lives here,’ she said. Under my fin
gers, the iron rods of the left-hand gate felt cold. There was no way I could tell if I was outside or inside the cage they made. ‘Do you know how to get there?’

  I asked one pedestrian and then another, and neither of them admitted ignorance and both sent us the wrong way. At last in a corner shop I got the right directions and found a street of weathered FOR SALE boards, windows with dirty, drooping curtains; and halfway along a sign which meant, if I had the correct number, my mother was living in a boarding house.

  Only, as it turned out, she wasn’t.

  ‘Single room, bed and breakfast.’ The woman opened the book that lay on the hall table and pointed to my mother’s name as evidence for the prosecution. ‘She left owing a week’s rent.’

  ‘When was this?’ I asked.

  ‘Would you be willing to settle the week? If she’s your mother, like you say.’

  ‘She was by herself?’ On her own in a single room; whoever he had been, the new lover hadn’t lasted long.

  ‘Nine weeks she was here. The last one unpaid for. Made an excuse on the Saturday, and didn’t come down for breakfast on the Sunday. When I went up, she was gone. Case and all.’

  I went out and told Mrs Morton. As far as I was concerned that was it, but she went in by herself and five minutes later came out with an address.

  ‘If she knows where my mother is, why hasn’t she been chasing her for the rent?’ I jerked my head at the house. ‘Maybe she’s lying about being owed money.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Mrs Morton said. ‘Anyway, she settled for half.’

  ‘You paid her?’ I was indignant. ‘What d’you do that for?’ I decided rich people had no idea of the value of money.